Movies I Have Seen Lately

Saw a Takashi Miike picture called The Great Yokai War. "Yokai" is a Japanese term for monsters from folklore, as opposed to the more familiar kaiju. It's a kids' picture, about a young boy from Tokyo sent out to live in the countryside with his older sister and his intermittently senile grandfather. When a vengeful spirit appears, the boy gets caught up in a war between warring groups of yokai and must find his courage to become the "Kirin Rider", the hero who will set everything to rights. It's not a bad picture - nothing deep, but an amusing story. Some of the yokai are really trippy, Japanese folklore can get pretty "out there", apparently.

I saw The Missouri Breaks in the theater. (It was my first Brando movie.) I own both Last Tango in Paris and The Missouri Breaks strictly because of Brando. The Missouri Breaks is quirky. I like it. Besides, it has both Brando and Nicholson. That alone makes it of interest. Plus, Brando appears in drag. No other film can make that claim.

I just watched Pharaoh's Curse (1957). This is a killer mummy movie I didn't know existed. The action is set in 1902 Egypt and mostly takes place at a remote tomb. The film is B&W, and it doesn't overcome its B-movie limitations, but it's a watchable B-movie rather than an unwatchable one. Some of the characterisations are a bit better than they might be and there's no unfunny comic relief.

HOUSE (1977): Japanese horror/comedy recommended to us by Bob. When I got the part where Mac’s decapitated head flew out of the well and bit Fantasy on the ass, I knew I was watching great cinema. Now you have to watch The Room. (Paybacks, and all that…)

FROM HELL: We bought this movie shortly after it came out on DVD but were never motivated to watch it until now. (It was still in its original shrinkwrap.) But the first issue of the “remastered” edition of the comic book inspired me to watch it at last. Okay, Hollywood tried to graft on some sort of love story between Aberline and Mary Kelly. That’s not even remotely factual, but I guess I can live with it. The whole way through I anticipated the grisly fate which awaited Heather Graham and wondered how audiences of the day reacted because they built her into such a likeable character. Then… the end. Just before the big reveal Tracy asked, “Did you catch it?” I must admit I did not. So ingrained in my mind is the Moore Campbell version that I didn’t, at first, catch what they did there. The movie itself is… okay. It’s about on par with most other Alan Moore comics translated to the big screen (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Watchmen, etc.). The “romance” aspect is bad enough, but that ending!

I used the advanced search at the IMDB to create a list of SF movies, TV movies and TV series up to 1980. One of the items is a Brazilian Planet of the Apes movie! It's a comedy called O Trapalhão no Planalto dos Macacos from 1976.

JANE EYRE (1944): I’ve never read the book nor seen the movie until last night. It stars Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine (and an uncredited Elizabeth Taylor). The actress who played Jane as a child later played Betsy Boldface on TV’s Batman. Dark Shadows fan that I am, I’m surprised I never looked into this before. >. Dark Shadows certainly borrowed several key elements from Jane Eyre, but the former is gothic horror and the latter is gothic romance. I would characterize it as a female David Copperfield. Certainly worth watching, at least once.

Luke, I was surprised to discover when researching some column that the Mummy series was a lot more complicated than I knew as a lad. There was one Karloff movie where he played the mummy Imhotep, but then the series essentially rebooted, with five (5!) more movies starring the mummy Kharis. Then Hammer did four Mummy movies, the first of which was a remake with Kharis, and then three more with three new mummies. I think I may have seen maybe a total of three, so I've got work to do!

I don't remember much about From Hell, except that I hated it. What was the surprise ending, Jeff? I thought Johnny Depp died in an opium den, but maybe I missed something. (The historical Abberline did not die in an opium den, so that's a surprise, I guess.)

It's even stranger. The second and third "Kharis" movies (not Karloff's Mummy, but they use flashback footage from his movie, and a Mesoamerican temple set from "Green Hell" as an Egyptian temple!) take place THIRTY years after the first Kharis movie, and the next one, twenty-five years later. But it's still the 1940s.

Many fan explanations exist. I think there's even some around this site.

Captain Comics said:

Luke, I was surprised to discover when researching some column that the Mummy series was a lot more complicated than I knew as a lad. There was one Karloff movie where he played the mummy Imhotep, but then the series essentially rebooted, with five (5!) more movies starring the mummy Kharis. Then Hammer did four Mummy movies, the first of which was a remake with Kharis, and then three more with three new mummies. I think I may have seen maybe a total of three, so I've got work to do!